Former Olympic boxer Tony Jeffries has made the difficult decision to step away from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu despite years of dedicated training and even earning his blue belt. Jeffries, who began training at age 37, recently shared his journey and the severe injury that ultimately led to his departure from the sport.
Jeffries embraced BJJ with the same intensity that marked his boxing career. Training up to seven times weekly, he approached the discipline with a competitive mindset:
“If someone is training three times a week and I’m training six times a week, I’m going to learn more twice as fast.”
This dedication quickly turned more serious as he fell in love with both the physical benefits and the skill development.
While Jeffries had experienced the usual soreness and occasional injuries that come with BJJ training, an incident in October marked a turning point. What began as discomfort in his scapula and neck evolved into something far more serious.
“The next day I woke up and I was in pain,”
Jeffries recounted in a video. After a week without improvement, he began experiencing alarming symptoms:
“I was getting tingling sensations in me fingers. I was getting numbing sensations down the right side of me body.”
Despite consulting multiple healthcare professionals, his condition deteriorated to the point where he
“was struggling to walk for more than 5 minutes”
and couldn’t turn his neck normally.
An MRI revealed the severity of his condition:
“disc bulges at multiple levels of the cervical spine, nerve compression.”
The imaging showed that when turning his head, his spine was compressing a nerve, causing the tingling sensations and significant muscle weakness, particularly affecting his grip strength.
Jeffries’ recovery journey was extensive and challenging. He wore a neck brace for weeks, tried compression machines to stretch his spine, and ultimately received a nerve root block injection directly into the affected area of his neck.
“They injected me with anti-inflammatory medicine and pain relief as well,”
he explained. The procedure required him to wear an arm cast and remain bedridden for three days afterward.
Fortunately, the treatment worked:
“I haven’t got any more pain in me neck. I haven’t got any more tingles in me arm.”
This improvement allowed him to return to boxing training and even set a Guinness World Record for most punches thrown in 24 hours.
Despite his physical recovery, Jeffries made the difficult decision to quit BJJ.
“I was just so paranoid that I’ll hurt me neck,”
he admitted. The fear of experiencing another serious injury that would put his life on hold again was too significant to ignore.
Jeffries particularly mourned losing the competitive aspect of BJJ that he loved:
“In jiu-jitsu you can go hard, be really competitive which I love the competitiveness of it.”
Interestingly, Jeffries doesn’t blame BJJ exclusively for his injury. He acknowledges that years of boxing, poor posture while working on computers and phones, and other factors contributed.
“I believe that getting choked in jiu-jitsu was just the straw that broke the camel’s back,”
he said.
He also takes personal responsibility:
“I blame one person for this injury and that one person is myself.”
He acknowledges he could have warmed up better, trained less intensely, and
“had less of an ego and tapped sooner when someone was choking me.”
Despite quitting BJJ, Jeffries still highly recommends the sport to others. As for his own fitness journey, he plans to continue boxing training and strength conditioning, possibly with some light BJJ rolling focusing solely on technique.
For Jeffries, the decision ultimately came down to protecting his long-term health and quality of life at age 40, preventing any more
“backwards stepping”
in his life and ensuring he can remain active with his family.
